Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(16)

“I don’t know who you think you are, but you don’t tell me what I need to do.” He took a deadly pause. “Ever.”

Before she could say anything, a few chunks of the drywall board fell down onto her bed with a wet thump sound, and then a stream of water started pouring from the decayed steel pipe in the ceiling.

One time, when she’d been about eight, her mom had left Tess at her aunt Beatrice’s house for a “short visit” that had lasted twelve weeks. She’d been there only a few days when she was pouring a glass of milk from the very full gallon jug and realized too late that she couldn’t control the fast-moving flow. Milk poured over the top of the blue plastic cup, ran across the counter, and dripped off onto the floor. She’d been so horrified by the sight and what her aunt’s reaction would be that she’d stood there frozen and just watched.

She found herself turning statue again as the water cascaded down onto her comforter covered in multicolored flowers, dread seeping into her as fast as the water flow. It splashed down, forming a small pool of water that turned the teal flowers into a dark turquoise before spreading across the surface and water falling off the side of the bed. Kahn made a surprised squeak of a meow and sprinted from the room.

“Holy shit,” her uncle yelled, his voice booming in the room despite the fact that it was coming out of the tiny speaker on her phone. “Go turn the main water valve off before the whole place floods.”

The idea of everything she owned drowning under the overflow jolted her back to the here and now. “Where is it?”

“Utility closet by the hot water heater.”

She was running toward it before the words were even all the way out of her uncle’s mouth.

Ten minutes later, the gushing had stopped and she was dumping out the buckets she’d found to catch what drained out after she’d turned off the main valve. Then she moved on to stuffing her sopping wet comforter into the washing machine and hanging her sheets over the fire escape railing. She was contemplating if she could fit the mattress out her window to air out on the fire escape when her front door opened.

“You here, Tess?” Her uncle’s bellow carried through the apartment and sent Kahn scurrying for cover.

She wouldn’t kill her uncle. She wouldn’t kill her uncle. She wouldn’t kill her uncle. It wasn’t the healthiest mantra, but it just might keep her out of jail.

“You know, by law you have to knock before you can come in,” she said, walking into the living room.

Raymond jingled his huge key ring. “I have a key.”

“It doesn’t matter.” How many times had she recited that landlord/tenant law to him? A million?

“I’m your uncle,” he said with a shrug as if that changed anything.

Raymond was a big, burly guy with more hair on his chin than his head and a determined glint to his eyes anytime money was mentioned. He had that glint now as he stood next to the neighborhood’s favorite plumber, her cousin Paul—who wasn’t Raymond’s kid but her aunt Louise’s youngest. There were a lot of Gardners in the neighborhood, lots of relatives to get dropped with when she had been growing up. Most were actual relatives. Others were relatives in name only but had been treated as if they were for so long that they might as well have been. Either way, her stays with them had always been temporary and awkward.

Raymond lifted a bushy eyebrow in the intimidating way he had when she’d asked for a second roll at the dinner table when she’d stayed with him for a weekend that turned into two months when she was twelve. “You want Paul and me to go back out in the hall and then walk out of here or do you want us to take a look at whatever you did?”

Too bad she wasn’t twelve and easily cowed anymore.

“I didn’t do anything. It was the old steel plumbing pipes that are the problem.”

“You’re a plumber now?” Paul asked, brushing past her and going into the bedroom.

“No,” she said, following after him and her uncle. “I have access to Google.”

In the bedroom, Paul looked up at the hole in the ceiling and let out a low whistle. “You’re gonna have to replace it, and I’ll have to check the rest of the pipes unless you want to have this happen again. Those steel pipes you have up there are way more susceptible to corrosion and decay.”

Tess turned a told-you-so smirk on her uncle, the landlord from hell.

“No water until I can fix it, and it’ll be a few weeks,” Paul said as he took out his phone and started scrolling through his calendar app. “I’m booked crazy with all the renovations those Harbor City newcomers are doing.”

Tess’s smirk flatlined. “No water? But I own the flower shop downstairs.”

Her breaths started coming in short bursts that did nothing to fill her lungs. No water meant no flowers. Her heart raced. No flowers meant no customers. She wiped her suddenly clammy palms on her jeans. No customers meant no money. A blast of panic singed her from her toes to the roots of her curly hair. No money meant overdue bills and financial ruin. That could not happen. She had a baby to think about.

“It’s on a different line, city zoning requirement for businesses versus residential.” Paul gave her the curious what-is-going-weird-with-you-now stare that all her cousins had been giving her for her entire life. “You just need to find a new place to live until the work is done.”